


Swing Wide Your Crane And Run Me Through

by fujiidom



Category: Psych
Genre: Coffee, F/M, Psychic Abilities, Turtles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 23:31:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2892131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fujiidom/pseuds/fujiidom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a bang and everything flickers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swing Wide Your Crane And Run Me Through

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> Dedicated to Lisa Turtle.

There’s a bang and everything flickers. In the second in between when he loses control of the car and when he feels his body lurch up with the force of the tilt, all he notices are the coffee cups spinning out across the dashboard, one sprays across his face like a liquid hot arterial flow. It stings across his shoulder. They’ve hardly had two sips before the car starting flipping so it must be upwards of a hundred degrees, even with the walk from the bodega to the car.

Juliet reaches out and in some far back recess of his brain he thinks she’s reaching for the wheel, which is worse than useless when your cruiser is flipping tail over end at forty-five miles per hour. Then when her hand connects with his shoulder, almost as if operating on adrenaline alone, he puts a hand on hers. It was stupid and sentimental and the only thing he remembers before things go to black.

Then there’s sirens, when he wakes up. Sirens blaring and the coffee can’t still be hot but his shoulder continues to burn and feel sopping wet. He shakes his head a bit and realizes the throbbing in his head isn’t only from the whirlwind trip ‘round and ‘round in his once-beautiful and perfect cruiser. Both Juliet and himself dangle upside down still.

“O’Hara.” Lassiter says, plainly. Like he is nodding over the box of donuts in the lobby at the station.

“Carlton,” Juliet says in a quiet voice. A quieter voice than he’d expect from someone who recently survived what seemed ready to be a near-fatal car crash. Her attention had been focused out her window when he first came to, but now her eyes are back on him and look dangerously intense. “Carlton, you’re awake. Take a deep breath. They have people working on getting us out now, but I’m going to need you to stay very still.”

Perhaps that was the wrong thing to say because Lassiter has barely registered her words before his instinct to look around gets him to glance out his window. Where there’s nothing but blue sky. At first, it makes it all feel more surreal. To the right is Juliet, eyes brimming with fear and tears with red and white lights shining behind her, on his left is only blue. Bluer than either her eyes or his own, with nothing visible for miles but upside down earth and clouds.

Juliet looks back out the passenger side and says something to someone up above them. Lassiter notices now that there doesn’t seem to be anything keeping her from climbing out the window. Perhaps the movement would shake the car, but surely she could’ve left by now.

His side of the car is mangled more and it’s clear that Juliet is the only one with a clean exit. “O’Hara get out of here,” he says, suddenly feeling tired again. Like he’d fallen asleep before and now he simply wanted to hit snooze on his alarm. It is an unnatural feeling for him.

“Carlton, please just be very still.” The strain in her voice is more pronounced than before.

His senses are a little more intense, now, and all he can smell is gasoline and sweat.

“Go,” he says. “This is a death trap. Get out. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Please--” Juliet says, losing some of her cool, but still with a firmness in her tone that makes the air crackle with tension.

“Here, I’ll go first,” Carlton says reaching for his seat belt. It’s an odd angle to be doing so upside down with your eyes wanting to close themselves, but he still tries to feel around for it.

“CARLTON, STAY STILL,” Juliet commands in her perp voice. His eyes shoot open again and the movement for the seat belt has made his shoulder even more sore. When he looks to see what that’s about, the coffee stain is there and there’s also a small pool of blood staining his shirt.

“Oh,” he states, voice small and fading. But the gasoline still stings his senses and the sick feeling of blood rushing to his head makes it feel more vital that he get his point across. “Get out of here. I’ll be fine.”

He seems to notice her hand still pushed into his shoulder slightly above his torso where he once almost dislocated his clavicle from the kickback of a Savage 99 he borrowed to admire and practice shooting. This hurt less, somehow, but he suspected the blood loss might play a role.

“Get out of here, O’Hara. I’m not going to get you killed because you wanna play nurse with me.”

She frowned despite herself, at the remark. Whether he actually smiled or felt like it, it was difficult to make out, but the concern quickly snuck back into her face.

“Carlton, I’m not leaving you in here. It’ll only be a minute longer. They have someone working to get the door off, now. My door’s stuck, too. We’re both stuck.”

“Break the glass,” he says, eyes shut, but still finding the fire to be mad. “Kick it out.”

Her breathing hitches because he knows deep down she must be fighting the instinct to do so. Why? Because of some blood and French roast ruined a good shirt.

“KICK OUT THE GLASS, JULIET,” he says with more force now. “Get out of here, if you die because of me I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Ditto,” she snipes back between jagged breaths. At a dying man, she still bickers. If he weren't mortally wounded, he might find the time to be proud.

“If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to--,” Lassiter trails off, trying to think of something worse than dying. Before he can, everything goes black again.

Glass breaks.

 

+++

A week goes by before he’s able to move the arm at all. It takes a full month beyond that to lift it to eye height.

Juliet does the limbo under his outstretched palm and if it’s a visual he cries over when he’s shaving the next day, his wound throbbing at the overexertion, you wouldn't know it then. He laughs and claps and drinks his first two fingers of scotch in a month.

He can’t return to active duty for what looks to be way too long, but everyone comes up with fun ideas for him to help build up his strength.

Henry takes him fishing again. Though this time it’s on a noisy public wharf and it’s a lot more enjoyable than last time they went out. He catches a small bass even though he couldn't help shake the feeling that an elaborate plot involving a store bought fish and a scuba suit was somehow involved, it’s not likely that Henry would humor that kind of nonsense. It does make him feel more himself than he’d thought he felt. Even if Henry has to fry the fish for him. Something about twisting his arm the way he likes to sauté, he knows now not to try and outdo himself. Five minutes of pleasure is not worth three days of pain.

Spencer and Guster get him something called a Grip N’ Grab, which might seem like a gag gift, but after the first time he begrudgingly used it to get a bag of pretzels he bought prior to the accident, it felt oddly thoughtful a gift. Guster probably picked it out leaving Spencer the one to paint the handle to look like a Glock 42. Or at least instruct Guster how to do it while eating a banana and watching TV.

Either way, it’s more than he anticipated from anyone. Even the rest of the folks at work had given him chocolates and whiskey. The latter was only good on days where the pain was low enough to be off the meds, but the thought is what matters.

O’Hara herself was wrapped up, ankle to knee, after kicking a hole through the passenger side window. Apparently a shard got her calf on the way out. As she put it, she let him take a breather, while she handled things, no longer fit to wait out when they would be pried loose.

The suspect they had been pursuing was also caught. The bullet lodged in Lassiter’s shoulder was traced back to a pawn shop in Montecito by Shawn.

Now it sat on his mantle like the trophy he never wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out or pack it away like holiday decorations and sunscreen. It almost killed him, so it was only fitting he stare at it on nights when nightmares kept him up and he spends an hour checking every window in his house three times over.  

Every time he tries to fall asleep, he hears glass breaking.

+++

It’s July when he first puts it all together, which he’d never admit to, for several reasons that are to do both with the context and the dust gathering on his detective badge.

O'Hara took him to a “painting night” where everyone pays someone else fifty dollars to be told how to paint. A waste of money if you ask him, but with his active duty still weeks away from merely being considered, he wouldn’t admit to being starved for company.

They are asked to draw a bale of turtles swimming over coral as seen from below. Carlton humors the teacher and actually follows the instructions. It’s not a talent that he finds much use for, but he’s always been something of a moderately talented artist himself. He practiced sketching perps while making his way up the ranks in case they wanted a triple threat. The stress it puts on his arm is a little much at times, but it feels good to work himself closer towards feeling healed. 

O'Hara's turtles look like cats, but he doesn’t say anything. The night is a nice escape from the seriousness of the last few weeks, between friends. O'Hara talking about her latest collars and Lassiter talking about how the guy before him at physical therapy seems like he might be a former mob boss.

After O'Hara's refused to run his priors for the fifth time, she makes the smallest gasp and tries to catch herself, when she looks over to see the progress on Lassiter’s painting. It’s so easily interpreted as another “Wow, you’re pretty good at this,” comment he’s gotten from a lot of the other painters, but not when it comes to O'Hara. He knows every intonation of her breathing. Whether that as something he’d come to know before the accident or because of it, it’s hard to say. Everything seems to blur together at this point. But it’s as clear to him as if she’d shot a gun in the air and he startles. Looking over to see what’s wrong, she’s only looking at his painting.

With a bit of innate side-eye (his painting is great, that’s been established by objective observers, even) he turns back and sees what she’s looking at. He’s drawn a tiny body floating at the top of the water.

“Huh.”

 

+++

The first time O'Hara comes over it feels like he’s being interrogated. In a very sweet and concerned way, much like the last time she thought he killed someone. As though it were a professional courtesy for her to wonder about it out loud. That way, if it were true, she could be the one to bring him in.

Or cover it up.

It was hard to pin down where O'Hara fell on that spectrum. After all they’d been through, it’s probably hard to assume anyone would have an easy answer to that.

She point blank asks him the second time she’s back asking similar questions. When, exactly, was the last time he’d been to Stearns Wharf and other leading questions. Not just feelers for whether he’s become a vigilante or chased crime off-duty.

After she comes back a third time, this time with photos, she has Spencer and Guster in tow. She lays down crime scene photos, probably risks getting suspended in doing so, and they both look at the painting he dug up from his back room. It’s like looking at a negative and a positive.

The view from below and the view from above. Even the placement of some of the rocks surrounding the small inlet. The shadows of the pier in the distance. It all felt like the whims of someone painting turtles would make to add some character to an otherwise plain water scene.

The look on Spencer’s face. He’s always suspected it before. But when he sees the other man sit down and put his mouth in his hands, he knows. Deep, deep down he knows so simply what he’s wondered and doubted for years. No one with a look of shock that intense has ever been psychic.

If he weren’t now dealing with being psychic himself, he’d probably say, “Gotcha.”

 

+++

It begins as a hobby. It’s the same thing some TV writer went through whilst pitching the idea of _Frasier_ to the crew of _Cheers_. Everyone’s shooing him off. The first time was a fluke. And who the hell is named Niles? "Frasier" is weird enough.

You can only produce so many random still life paintings with nothing distinguishable before people start to put the bricks back up between what’s possible and not possible.

He paints every night at five and before he knows it, his arm is nearly healed. He passes re-certification and goes back to running down cases with O'Hara. Still, he paints, wondering if that really was the biggest coincidence of his life. Short of O'Hara building up exactly the right amount of lower leg strength needed for roller derby and window kicking.

In a fit, he gives up after a month of nothing. He actually goes out of his way to burn the canvasses in his backyard. He pours some scotch on the flames and while they don’t get out of control by his judgment, a neighbor (probably one who finds his input at the HOA meetings unhelpful) calls the cops. That’s when he finds out that O’Hara has had someone on call to alert her if something like that ever happened.

She shows up after the fire department. They’re gone less than a minute after they agree that someone might have jumped the gun, O’Hara mulls around his kitchen looking like a puppy that knows it tore his favorite pair of loafers. She’s lucky that’s not really the case. He would be a lot more upset if it were.

“Carlton, I’m sorry. I know you probably think I overstepped my bounds,” she says, head down.

He sighs. Part of him agrees, sure. But the other part. “You would have to do a lot more than care too much to piss me off, at this point, O’Hara.”

She puts a hand over her forehead. “I guess this means that you’re not really psychic.”

“Yeah, I should tell Spencer. That makes two of us.”

O’Hara looks sad and he feels kind of bad for bringing it up.

“Can I get you something to drink or eat? Did you eat dinner?”

She nods, still seeming far away in thought. “Beer is fine, if you have it.”

He grabs an old Heineken from one of the nights she was here to make him watch _The Voice_ or play chess. It’s been a while since he’s been back to work and they see more of each other than they had in the past.

They sit in the quiet of his living room. She stares at the only remaining painting. The original with those fucking turtles.

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“What was the vision like?” She asks. “I always wondered that about Shawn, but now we know the truth there. I never really asked him since it seemed pretty straight forward. Yours, it, if it really did happen, I don’t remember you having that kind of an outburst when we went out.”

“Oh.” He sips the glass of whiskey that he’d poured earlier. It is room temperature and burns a bit going down. “I don’t remember.”

There’s more silence. Then Juliet perks upright, sitting on a foot and staring at him. “Aren’t you curious about how this all happened, though?”

He stares at her for what feels like forever. Did she forget why she came? “Of course I am. You saw me get so fed up with obsessing over it that I burned the failed attempts to solve it.”

“Well, then.” She takes another sip of her beer, it’s already empty by the look of it. He didn’t remember her gulping it down, but it clangs, hollow, on the table when she puts it down. “Partner. Let’s figure this out together.”

Lassiter bristles a bit and sets his own glass down. “I don’t want to involve you with--this--it’s all a misunderstanding. I am certain that it was all some kind of freak coincidence.”

She’s quiet again, but a thinking kind of quiet. As her partner of five years, he knows this to mean that it’s actually quite loud despite the silence. “Then let’s rule everything out. Let’s reenact everything. The exact same scenario it first happened in.”

“I can check Groupon, but I doubt there’s anything this short notice.”

She pulls a face. “Well, sure. In the mean time, let’s sit here, together, and paint.”

“Oh,” he says back. “I think I got rid of my spare canvasses.”

“How many did you have?”

His body language must give him away because her face falls. He must be better at hiding this obsession than he’s realized. Or maybe he doesn’t really share as much as it feels like he does. Before Juliet and Spencer and Guster all came along, he’d be shocked if some of his colleagues knew what he took in his coffee, let alone the look on his face when he realized he’s potentially a psychic.

“Carlton.” She reaches over and looks like she’s about to tuck a hair behind his ear. His hair hasn’t been long enough to do that since 1974. A part of him, scared at the closeness, scared at what it makes him feel, on edge, lurches back. She looks embarrassed, whether it’s for him or herself, he can’t tell. “I’m sorry.”

She sits up, then, and in true Juliet form refuses to leave. She doesn’t take the easy way out. She kicks windows in and saves lives while suspended upside-down.

She rolls up her sleeves and starts rooting around for things to use for their makeshift paint night.

It takes some maneuvering, but once she’s found his stow of paints and has a stack of printer paper in front of them, she lays down some old bed sheets and uses 8x10 picture frame backs as mini easels. He’s joking about how her picture frame keeps falling, she’s allowed them to both start off with a big giant turtle, to break the ice.

Everything is back to feeling a lot more normal.

Later, however, when they’ve finished their turtles and moved on to painting “an open grassy field” Juliet gets up to get a third beer. She walks across the living room and for the first time she notices the bullet sitting on the mantle. To her credit, she walks on trying to ignore her seeing it. It’s small and crushed in on the side. Easy to miss.

She sits back down after she’s returned and gets back to making conversation and drawing a tiny flower in the right hand corner of her field. Lassiter smiles.

“It’s okay, I know you saw the bullet. Feel free to give me your opinion on it. I know you’re biting your tongue.”

Juliet puts her brush down and looks back over at the bullet.

“Why did you keep it? Are you mad? Are you upset?”

“Yes,” he says, honestly. “There’s no right answer here and I don’t even have a real desire to look at it, myself. It does feel a bit ridiculous to simply throw something that almost killed me in the trash. Keep your enemies closer, all that.”

She grins and nods. “I get it.”

With another look, he can tell she’s curious to look at it. He would be, too. By the transitive property, it almost killed her too. His car did eventually go up in flames, albeit after they’d been out for twenty minutes. His eyebrows shoot up as a signal that it’s okay.

Walking over slowly, she picks it up delicately and turns it over in his hand. His smile fades, but his expression remains warm. She still has it in her hand when she turns back in his direction.

And then it happens. They make eye contact for the briefest of seconds and he doubles over, clutching his shoulder. “Carlton!” She shouts, running forward.

Setting the bullet down, it’s like a weight was lifted. His mouth hangs open still. Everything about that interaction felt deeply ominous.

“What was that?” She asks, baffled by his pain and immediate recovery.

“Shit,” he says, eyes closed.

“Carlton,” she says, adamant. “What was that?”

“I think I’m definitely psychic.”

“What?”

“Pick up the bullet again.” She does.

There’s no pain for a few seconds. He opens his eyes and looks around, confused. About to explain, he makes eye contact again and the second he does he lets out a guttural sigh. “Oh, god.”

He doesn’t do a dance. To be clear, here, he’s not going to behave even half as melodramatic as Spencer used to. The difference in intensity was so amplified that it seemed to be affecting the entire experience. “Carlton, are you in pain? Is there a way to stop it, if you’re hurt?” Juliet says, over a flash of images. Well, images is perhaps a bit too generous a term. He sees things like feelings and objects, fuzzy with movement. It’s like he’s spinning around the room.

It’s like he’s still in the police cruiser.

He spins and spins and finally his focus lands on one image. A UC Santa Barbara college ID sitting on where the speedometer would be if this were a real car and a real tail spin and a real nightmare. It says Michael Forrester and while he’s trying to read the numbers, the year, look for anything identifying while it spins out of view every rotation. He makes out 2013 before things slam into stillness.

All he sees are Juliet’s eyes coming into soft focus, tears falling furiously. He blinks and she bursts into full-on hysterics. “Fifty-four.” She stands up, one hand on her hip and the other pressed flatly on her forehead as she cried.

He pants, unaware that he was experiencing it all for more than the ten seconds it felt.

“What happened?” He asks this nervously, careful not to upset Juliet further than she already is.

She takes her time catching her breath and composing herself. “You went catatonic for almost a five minutes, Carlton. I thought I just watched you die.” Her face contorts into maybe one of the most miserable expressions he’s ever seen. “Again.”

He’s not sure what to say to that. Until he remembers the thing. The “vision” whatever you want to call it. He grabs a fountain pen from his table and writes down Michael Forrester’s name, as much of the ID number he can recall (most of it) and tries to briefly sketch his face. Hopefully it’s enough to find on name and school alone, but before it fades from his mind he wants to capture it.

Juliet creeps back over, now calmed down to a sort of dull sadness.

“We have to go to UC Santa Barbara,” he says, taking a water bottle she’s put in his hand.

“Carlton,” she says, slowly. “I think we need to go to the hospital. I told myself I would give you one more minute and I was calling an ambulance. Maybe this is, you know, but if it’s not? You should see a doctor. That was not normal behavior.”

So, rather than put up the fight he wants, he agrees that if she takes him to UCSB, he’ll go see a doctor right after. He can’t let this go. Not if the last time it ended up being too late to do more than look at crime scene photos.

They don’t really discuss anything that happened beyond the name and student ID number. O’Hara looks brimming with questions, but is kindly keeping her mouth shut.

She ran down Forrester’s information on his laptop. He lives a few miles off campus, now. Having graduated last spring.

When the arrive at his apartment, he’s there and alive in the flesh. He’s also quite hospitable given that it’s 11:30 at night as they question him about his school ID, about what might have be behind Lassiter seeing him. Nothing pans out.

The ride to the emergency room is tense, after, but neither Lassiter or O’Hara wants to be the one to break the silence or bring up the psychic elephant in the room.

The tests all come back fine and the pair walks back out to the car. Before Lassiter gets in, he braces both hands on the top of O’Hara’s small sedan. He leans, head turning down and perpendicular to the passenger side window.

He was healthy. So this all officially had no easy off switch.

O’Hara sighs with sympathy and tucks her keys back in her pocket. She comes around the car to lean with her back against the rear window next to him. “It’s going to be okay,” she says so genuine that he really, really wants to believe her. Just for a second.

“How?” He asks, honestly. He leans upwards a bit, resting his head on his right arm. This used to hurt to do.

“Well, Forrester is still alive. Maybe it’s all a bunch of weird coincidences. You might’ve only got unlucky the first time since, y’know, the guy was dead.”

He shakes his head. “It’s more than that, O’Hara. It’s a ticking time bomb. _I’m_ a ticking time bomb.”

“You’re still you!”

“But don’t you get why that makes this so much worse? I’m not Shawn. I don’t want _this_. I refuse to drag you into this and ruin your life like he did with Guster.”

Juliet crosses her arms and makes a very unflattering face. “I don’t think either of them would consider it to have ruined Burton’s life. That’s a bit ridiculous.”

“So is the idea that anyone would _want_ this.”

“I don’t think he ever wanted _this_ , he wanted to help solve crimes. Same as you.”

Lassiter laughs with no warmth at that. He stands up and stares plainly at O’Hara.

“The same thing that got Spencer closer to becoming a detective is the same thing that’s going to stop me from remaining one.”

O’Hara steps forward to argue the point, but he simply holds up a hand. Whether the feeling he has comes from this ability, this _curse_ , he is fairly certain he’s not wrong.

She looks pained but stays quiet and tired. It’s like she’s aged a year in under two hours. He’s scared to see a mirror.

They putter around in a tense silence for another few minutes before getting back in the car and returning home.

O’Hara categorically refuses to leave him alone overnight and so she sleeps in his bed while he tosses and turns on the couch.

When sleep comes, he’s gone for hours.

 

+++

Lassiter wakes up to the sound of dishes being delicately shuffled around his kitchen and the smell of Chinese food.

O’Hara looks over and sheepishly holds up a carton she was trying to juggle with a glass of water. “Sorry, I figured you could use the meal. I was going to make breakfast, but all you have is frozen dinners.”

“Nothing wrong with a well prepared meal. They’re healthier than _that_ ,” he says while patting down his hair and unruffling his night shirt. He points to the container.

“Here, sit down and shut up.”

He sits and they eat szechuan noodles at noon.

 

+++

They go back to work the following day and try to treat things as normally as possible. It’s a struggle.

+++

Lassiter goes back to sleeping alone. He sits through _The Voice_ because O’Hara has taken to talking about what happened the night before in an effort to check in and be sure he’s living a normal life for at least an hour at a time.

He parks outside Michael Forrester’s downtown apartment at random times. Watching the other man go about his life. Living his life. Wondering why he saw his face.

It feels as though he’s been sleepwalking through days since he had that episode and it’s hard to put a pin on exactly how odd that feels since he’d never actually slept walked any time prior.

He starts noticing things about Forrester. The way he walks his dog at 8:30AM and 8:30PM as if on a timer. His friend drives a truck with a hula girl that sways in the wind from the hitch on its back bumper even when the two are inside. He has a surfboard propped up in his living room but it never moves from that spot so it’s probably an abandoned hobby.

Lassiter knows that this is borderline unhealthy, but other than _The Voice_ and the hum-drum cases he’s been getting at work, there’s nothing else he can focus on. This is his meditation, every day. He does feel pretty terrible about the day he escalates to following Michael to work. Then worse the week later he spends an entire weekday afternoon tailing him down the 101. All he does is shop and go to a gym. It feels humiliating, to be this deep into watching someone simply be a human being. That shouldn’t be novel enough to keep his attention for this long. He shouldn’t feel that estranged from the concept that it’s like something new and unique to see.

+++

On a Thursday when he’s leaving to watch Forrester for only the second time that week (he’s cut back), he opens the door to find Spencer sitting on his porch step. He looks even worse than Lassiter and that was saying something.

It was almost enough to make him feel like his old self. Shaking his head at the untucked shirts and the hair products.

“Spencer,” Lassiter states, making Shawn jump a little where he was staring off into space.

“Lassiter.” Shawn shakes his head and holds a hand to the back of his neck with some trepidation. He’d clearly been building up to this and wasn’t quite ready to jump in. Not a normal look for Spencer, that he can remember. Though it’s been a while since he’d shown his face at the precinct or elsewhere.

“What are you doing on my front step? Besides trespassing?” Lassiter walks forward towards his car, trying to go about his day like he wasn’t about to go stalk someone for the third week straight.

“I had to apologize. For everything,” Shawn says, earnest. No bullshit, no fanfare. If Spencer were more like this, frankly, more like his father tended to be, he probably wouldn’t have found him so annoying. “I know it’s a ridiculous situation to be in. To not be psychic and know that some day _you’d_ really be psychic and how of all the things to fake and to lie about.”

Shawn mumbles around the jumble of words, trying to clarify. Lassiter holds up a hand. “Hate to break it to you, fake psychic, I’m more like you than you think.”

“Wait, what?” Shawn asks, confused. “But Juliet said--”

Lassiter flinches, but keeps moving, now closing in on his car door. “Well take it straight from the source: I’m not psychic.”

Spencer isn’t having it, it seems. Meanwhile, today was probably the day Forrester was going to go join a gang or take up sky diving. Lassiter was now going to have to sit here while he missed it. “Are you going to be long?”

“I had other things to say, yeah, hold on.” Spencer pulls a little scrap of folded paper from his pocket and Lassiter’s heart sinks a little.

As infuriating as it was to have physical proof Spencer (and probably Guster by proxy) had been lying to everyone for years, he had been pretty gratified to be right. Enough to happily box up that portion of his life, dealing with the two of them flitting around like gnats. He’d really forgotten to think about how things shaking out the way they did must’ve affected Spencer, too.

Consulting on cases wasn’t a hobby for him either and Carlton remembered how tough those months of bed rest were for him even when he had the promise of reinstatement in the future.

“Get in the car and say it, then. I have somewhere to be.”

Spencer unfurled the paper and they drove while he went bullet by bullet.

 

+++

Spencer enrolls in the police academy a few days later. Guster and O’Hara text him photos of Shawn in uniform.

They might as well be pictures of a dog standing on it’s hind legs. He's proud, sure, but it’s still deeply unnerving to look for longer than a few seconds.

 

+++

This swinging, back and forth, between normal and the furthest thing from it, it makes him dizzy.

He might be able to deal with this--thing--the psychic thing, if it came or went entirely. One way or the other, he can’t quite grasp enough straws to pull the bale off of his chest.

Until a Friday in August. He’s sitting in the parking lot of a Burger King watching Forrester eat a Whopper, alone, inside. It’s not a glamorous reality up until the important part, but that’s what he was doing and thank hell for that.

It’s late and there’s no one else even in the restaurant. The dining room probably only has another twenty minutes left open. Which is when it happens. Forrester starts choking.

It’s not noticeable at first. Lassiter even looks away as it starts. The guy could simply be clearing his throat. Then he keeps the hand to his mouth, in a fist. Until he starts pounding his chest intermittently and trying to dislodge whatever is stuck. Lassiter bolts up and out of his cruiser.

When Lassiter pounds his back the seventh time, ambulance called by one of the teenagers working behind the counter, Forrester spits out the piece of burger and gasps for air. Lassiter looks around at the mess on the ground. Fries scattered in a pool of soda. Forresters keys and wallet thrown under the booth. Bending down to gather up the items, Lassiter’s face first meets a handful of cards and cash. He grabs for the card closest to him.

University of California at Santa Barbara, #4401999828. Class of 2013.

 

+++

He goes right to O’Hara’s place afterwards. Still shaking with the adrenaline and the fear.

She doesn’t answer right away and he thinks about leaving before she opens the door. This feels dangerous, again, this inbetween. Supernatural and natural, partners and friends, life and death. When O’Hara does come to the door, in a robe and slippers, she looks immediately upset.

His arms are outstretched and holding his tired body up with a hand on each side of the door frame. “Carlton, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I saved Michael Forrester from choking tonight.”

She stares at him with her mouth in a hard line.

His focus drifts from her face to somewhere behind her, reliving the events in his mind for the first time since leaving the scene. “And when I bent down to get his keys and wallet, everything that dropped in the process of helping him breathe, the first thing I picked up was his school ID. It was facing down and I turned it over and there was his face and the ID number. Everything.”

Her mouth twists into an angry frown and her eyes fill up with water. She reaches out and puts her arms around his neck, pulling him through the doorway. He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding and suddenly collapses forward.

O’Hara stumbles but keeps him up in her arms long enough to lower them into a heap safely with her on her knees. “What’s happening to me? Juliet? What’s--?” He cries into her elbow and she keeps an arm around his head delicately waiting for him to wear himself calm.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, whispering into his rumpled hair.

 

+++

He wakes up on the side of the road. He fumbles around to sit up and feel his face, to be sure he isn’t dreaming. The grass is wet and he can feel where it’s soaked into his chinos.

There’s a light mist and fog that makes the empty stretch of road look like a horror movie. He stands and at the sound of metal gently scraping against black top, he spins to look behind him.

His cruiser rocks back and forth, mangled and upturned.

He shakes off the last remaining licks of sleep and walks towards the car. He bends down and O’Hara is banging on the glass, upside down. She kicks the glass and tells him to stand back. Nothing cracks, nothing shatters, the car only rocks back and forth in place. He tries kicking it himself and after twenty minutes he collapses staring in from the outside. Her sad eyes looking at him from behind the scuffed window.

She holds up a hand and yells for him to get away from the car. It’s not safe. He tries to tell her he won’t leave, but the words won’t come. She holds up a piece of paper, a missing persons flyer, for a young girl. She pulls it back and writes “VERONICA” across the bottom where the font is smaller and the white space lets the dark red blood mark the paper.

When she pushes it up against the glass, it stains the window in a smear.

She yells again for him to get out of there. Or else.

He crawls backward very slowly, still on his hands and feet. He watches the car catch fire and tears sting his eyes. Seconds before it blows, from twenty feet back, he somehow makes out the whites of Juliet’s eyes.

Then there’s only fire and ash.

 

+++

In a cold sweat, Lassiter jumps awake. This time in a bed.

He looks over and sees O’Hara curled up behind him over the covers that he’s wrapped up in. He reaches out, careful not to disturb her, and lays a hand over her cheek.

To make sure he’s not still dreaming.

Despite his attempt at discretion, she startles with a deep, tired sigh. When her eyes open, he bites back more tears.

“I dreamt that you died,” he says with a hoarse voice and no pretense because at this point he’s fully committed to being the resident lunatic psychic weirdo after Spencer took up police school.

She smiles a little and it breaks his heart, the empathy it betrays. “I’ve had that dream, too.”

“That you died in the car?” he asks, curiously.

“No, that you did. And you never wake up, like you did.”

He pulls his hand away and lays his head flat on the pillow, looking at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to bring this darkness into your life.”

Her forehead crinkles and she smiles again. “Carlton, if I were afraid of the dark then I picked the wrong line of work.”

He nods, head still on its side. “You’re my best friend, you know.” He’s not sure why he says it but he feels the need to speak in certain terms after the risk of not ever having a chance to do so again was so recently looming.

“I know,” she says with a smirk.

“Okay.” He stares at her with a blinding affection. “Just checking.”

 

+++

They search for missing girls under ten. They find Vanessa Dottle to be the best guess for the picture. Unlike the last vision, Carlton admits to being a bit more distracted and short on memory of what exactly the missing person flyer said.

They find the actual copy of the flyer in the police database.

They run down every person she’s ever lived near, gone to school with, or simply crossed paths with that might be named VERONICA.

O’Hara is concerned that maybe all Lassiter saw was VANESSA and he’s misremembering, but he’s certain. He saw her scrawl it in blood. It would be a pretty large thing to mistake.

When Guster shows up with beignets and photos from Shawn’s first patrol, things take a turn. With a map splayed out on a table in the conference room, he points out that maybe it’s not a person. Now that he’s back to being a pharmaceutical rep, he cuts through Elings Park on his way home from the golf club. The road he takes off the 101 is called Veronica Springs.

They drive to the springs in question which are a neighborhood rather than an actual spring. They go house by house canvassing and asking for any leads.

The last house on the cul de sac has a massive back yard with access to the community’s set of hiking trails. The door opens and the hair on the back of Lassiter’s neck stands up.

They find the girl in an old cellar a half a mile from the main house. O’Hara wrings a hand around the back of his neck with glee.

 

+++

When they’re back at his place after, she sips a beer and puts a hand over her mouth.

“This is real.”

He shakes his head. “It is.”

“This is really happening.”

In moments like this, much like the high after saving Forrester, it feels as though this is potentially a good situation. Good things have come from this. It makes him nervous about what it means for his mental health and hers, along with his career, but at the end of the day he also got a little girl back home to her parents. It’s hard to not see the upside to it.

“We have to figure out how exactly it’s triggered. Obviously, Shawn was faking his “visions”, so it’s not like you need to be at the scene of the crime or look at case details. It only comes and goes as the universe sees fit, I guess.”

He sets down his glass and puts his hands together. He’d been avoiding this topic for long enough. If she’s in, she’s in. There’s no keeping secrets when you’re partners in something and up until this point he’s tried to politely maintain an out. “It’s you, O’Hara.”

“Wait, what?” she says, putting her own drink down next to his.

“Every time I have--if we’re calling them visions, fine--every time I have one, it’s when I’m around,” he pauses and looks up at her, “ _you_.”

“Is it because I was in the car?” Her voice is almost inaudible.

He sits back, putting his hands on his knees. “I don’t know. None of it makes sense.”

“It makes a little sense,” she corrects. When his eyebrows shoot up in question, she continues. “You died, Carlton. Haven’t you seen any movies or TV? That’s classic ‘and then they started seeing things’ behavior.”

“In the movies I watch, the protagonist usually doesn’t die.”

“So now you’re the protagonist? What am I, script supervisor?”

He chuckles, low and deep. “If this is all because I died, then there’s really no going back. I can’t exactly _un_ die, can I?”

She pushes closer on the couch and has that matter of fact posture that makes him think she’d be a great teacher. All specifics and no nonsense, hands out, voice stern. “You need to tell me everything that’s happened. I know you, Carlton. Whatever you’ve been leaving out. Whatever you’ve been telling me the abridged version of events for. Lay it all out. We’ll sort through this just like any other case.”

“Okay.” He sits up straighter and thinks back to the first time. “You might want to grab another beer first.”

She grins and leans close.

 

+++

After hours of trying to trigger another vision by doing everything from them playing some sick version of hot potato with the bullet (that almost killed him, mind you) to doing terrible improv versions of reenacting the events leading up to each individual vision, they end up laying in bed, curled forward, knees bent and eyes wide. “Nothing,” he says, forlorn.

She reaches forward to put her hand on his shoulder and when she meets his eyes, it’s clear she seeks his okay. He looks down where her hand rests, where his wound has scarred over with new flesh.

She pushes his shirt open at the collar and a few buttons give to the tension. It slides off his shoulder and without much more pressure, his shoulder is visible. Tracing her fingers over the uneven skin, he sucks in a sharp pull of air and closes his eyes.

“Carlton?” O’Hara asks, quiet, flattening her hand to his shoulder. “Did it work?” She asks not so much to him but herself.

“No.” He opens his eyes lazily with a small smile. “I got a chill down my spine, though. Can’t tell if that's because I’m a psychic or a red-blooded male.”

She looks down but doesn’t blush. “Oh.”

She frowns when her gaze returns to his shoulder. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“It’s not as ugly as I’d thought it would look.”

“Gee, thanks, O’Hara. Sure know how to make a guy feel special; get his shirt off, get him in bed, tell him he’s not as ugly as you’d hoped.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s healed nicely, okay. That’s what I was trying to say.”

“Thank you,” he says kinder than she appears to expect. He thinks on it and continues. “Thank you for everything, if I haven’t made that clear enough. I would never have lasted this long without you, fatal bullet wound and subsequent mental deterioration alike. All of it. Thank you.”

Her response is a shrug with her eyes closed. It would be a nonchalant dismissal of it all, which didn’t bother him, but since they were leant so close on the bed it immediately becomes a problem.

She rolls her head towards her shoulder and he can feel the edges of her bangs ghost across his forehead. With her hand still on his shoulder, the momentum knocks him sideways for a second and he grabs at her hand on reflex.

She stops mid-shrug when his palm connects with the back of her hand and her head comes to a rest so close to his that their noses are practically touching.

“Your hand was here before the car even stopped flipping,” he whispers against her face. “How?”

“I told you, I saw the shooter and knew you were hit. I mean, it’s why the car _started_ flipping in the first place.”

“But to have the presence of mind to reach over and even attempt to apply pressure while we’re being hurled around.” He stops because he can’t continue without getting upset.

“You would’ve done the same for me.”

“Please know that I would,” he says, earnest. “Please know that I would stanch every wound. I would wait for you. I would kick every in window from here to Miami. I would--” he stammers and looks up, eyes shiny and voice constricted. “Juliet, there isn’t a thing I would not do for you. If I spend decades trying to break even or prove it, I will.”

Juliet leans forward and presses her mouth against his. In a completely not sexual way, it’s the most intimate he’s ever been with another person. Perhaps more so than any sexual encounters he’s ever had. It feels as though their spirits were pushed together and they both amiably settled nestled, next to one another.

He pulls back and stares at her for a long few seconds and then leans back in to kiss her, closed-mouth still. A spark lights up from the slight turn of her head and ignites a path through the darkness that’s been filling up the corners of his head for the last few weeks, the last few months, and he feels more alive than he did when they brought him back to life the first time.

It’s been days since he shaved and he’s immediately concerned that he’s not thought any of this through. His beard is probably scratching up her pretty face and he didn’t even brush his teeth after the grapes they ate earlier.

He pries himself away from the most charged up closed-mouth kiss he’s ever experienced and tries to pull himself up on his elbows. It’s difficult.

“Juliet, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take advantage of your sympathy.”

“What?” she asks, mouth red and eyes fluttering.

“Please don’t misconstrue my genuine appreciation of what you’ve done with whatever that might have been.”

“Carlton, what are you talking about?”

“I kissed you. It was totally inappropriate.”

“I kissed you, you idiot.” She leans upwards and slams their mouths together again, this time opening hers and drawing his tongue out.

Minutes pass and he pulls back again. “I’m sorry, I want to be clear. I should declare my intentions here so that you have the ability to step away and save yourself the trouble.”

“For god’s sake, Carlton, do I have to write you an invitation? You’re talking like a landowner from the 1800’s.”

He sighs, shirt nearly all the way unbuttoned and sternum hair regrettably fully out, run wild and free to the open air in the warm light of the room.

“I’m in love with you and I’d very much like to date you.”

Juliet stares wide back at him, expression blank. “Okay.”

“Okay, what? Is that a good or a bad okay? We’re partners. This will obviously have irrevocable effect on our work life, as well as our personal ones. I want to be sure that you’re okay with that.”

“Can we go over the rules and regulations after we’ve had sex? So at least the fun part isn’t a total waste.”

He should put up a bigger fight, but once she’s back to kissing him and her hands are down his pants, it all does feel pretty arbitrary.

Afterwards, while they’re drifting off to sleep, he kisses the back of her neck, eyes closed and alive.

 

+++

He dreams about walking down the highway, Juliet’s legs wrapped around his waist. A formal piggy-back ride past the wreckage where they’ve both died.

+++

They save a construction worker from falling over a beam's edge. Then a woman with a limp who almost gets hit by a bus. Another recent college grad who got mixed up with a crowd of people who wouldn’t have cared if he woke up after passing out drunk.

It’s not the sex that causes the visions. They, well, they test that. It’s a random trigger that might not even be a trigger so much as a calling, when things need help, and there’s no way to predict when it’ll happen next. It does coincide with Juliet's proximity. On the week where she goes away on family business, Lassiter goes a week without a single vision. In theory it's a vacation from the whole thing, but in practice, they both end up racked with guilt over any lives they might've let slip through the cracks. 

 

+++

It doesn’t hurt like it did. There are times when he hunches over with a twinge or spaces out to come back with an image to relay or dreams without Juliet there to help sort through the clues in real dream-world time.

But the loneliness, the unease. That is nearly all gone.

He grows his beard out fully, at Juliet’s advisement, and retires as a police officer less a month after they start sleeping together.

Juliet gets promoted to lead detective and neither one has to suffer a transfer or suspension.

 

+++

“I was full of so much shit, huh?” Spencer says over coffee. 

Lassiter teaches at the academy on Thursdays. He stops by the precinct to pick up Juliet and carpool home everyday around five.

“So very much,” Lassiter nods.

“In my defense, I didn’t really believe in psychics myself, at the time. I was kind of making it up as I went along.”

Lassiter shakes his head. “Yesterday, I had a moment, while I was teaching.”

“You saw something?” Guster says, intrigued.

“It’s not always that specific, but sort of. A sensation that there was a lost dog nearby,” Lassiter explains.

“That’s ridiculous,” Shawn says, making a face.

“Welcome to the life of being an actual psychic. A lot of the stuff coming at me is pretty mundane, now. Back in the beginning it was all complex murders and life saving. I get that still, but a lot of it is knowing how to ignore the glimpses of why the guy ahead of you at the grocery store hates his mom and sort through to find the important information.”

“Sounds terrible,” Shawn says, honest. “I mean, good for you, saving lives. But damn. At least I made it fun.”

“It doesn’t happen like you pretended it did. Like I was saying, I was teaching a class, I took a second, had a vision, then got back to work and completed an entire lesson plan on Miranda rights.”

“Please, Lassie, even if it did happen like it didn't actually happen to me, you’d find a way to make it boring.”

“Doesn’t sound boring to me,” Gus says. He nods as they all look up to see Juliet locking up her office and heading their way. “He’s seeing into the future. If you ever get lottery numbers, you know which of us never judged you for your gifts, right?”

He smirks at Guster and gives him a small, placating nod.

Shawn straightens as Juliet saddles up next to Lassiter. “Captain, your boyfriend is talking about running a con on the lottery. Should I arrest him?”

“At ease, Detective.” She nods at him politely with a grin before she turns back to Carlton. “You ready for _The Voice_ tonight?”

“Danny is a goner,” Lassiter says, deadpan.

“ _Spoilers_ , man!” Shawn yelps.

“I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m rooting for him to finally get the boot.”

“You’re a psychic, Lassiter. Everything you say could be spoilers. Have a little sympathy for the laypeople. _Please_!”

Lassiter and O’Hara both roll their eyes and make for the exit.

Gus leans into whisper at Shawn, “Dude, he painted that painting in her office.”

“ _What_?” Shawn says in a high pitched, disbelieving voice. “Shut up, that’s way too nice for Lassiter to have painted.”

“No, he’s apparently a pretty decent artist. He was telling me about it before you came over. That’s the picture from the first case he worked as a psychic, remember? The one with the dead body.”

“ _That’s_ the picture in there?”

“Yep, I think they showed it to us back then, but all I remember was how close it was to the crime scene photos. Creepy.”

“All I ever noticed were the turtles.”

“I know, right? They’re pretty dope.”

“That’s why I can’t believe that Lassiter painted it. Or that there’s a dead body floating around in there like Where’s Waldo gone wrong.” Shawn scrunches his face up at the idea.

“It was painted in a trance, Shawn. It’s not like he was trying to make the back cover of Highlights.”

Gus gives him a very unimpressed look.

“Can you not? You just ruined a perfectly nice painting with all these terrible revelations. Don't wreck dentist offices for me, too.”

 

+++

“You didn’t really know that Danny was going to get voted off, right?” Juliet asks.

“No, I didn’t. Please don’t let them fill your head with the idea that I’m some kind of mind reader.” Lassiter smirks and kisses her shoulder. “There are plenty of questions I don’t know the answer to.”

Juliet looks back at him, head cocked and lashes fluttering. “Plenty, huh.”

“Plenty.”

She holds his eyes for a long second and nods.

They kiss again as the credits roll across the bottom half of the screen.


End file.
